Emoluments, shlemoluments.

Our founders were not trusting people. They barely trusted each other, and they certainly didn’t trust what future generations might do to destroy the idea they risked their lives to make real.

The Founders were obsessed with one question above all others at the Constitutional Convention: how do you stop powerful men from getting paid off?

They’d watched European kings buy foreign ministers with gifts, titles, and quiet back-room deals. They damn sure weren’t going to let that happen here.

So they wrote two rules directly into the Constitution.

One: No federal official can accept anything of value from a foreign government without Congress’s approval.

And, two: The president gets one paycheck — the one we all know about. No cute side deals. No perks. No off-the-books benefits.

Hamilton called corruption the republic’s greatest internal threat, and the Emoluments Clauses were the Founders’ attempt to make corruption literally unconstitutional.

For more than 200 years, presidents stayed squeaky clean.

They divested. They used blind trusts. They rejected anything that even looked like a foreign benefit. They treated the appearance of a conflict as political suicide — not because courts forced them to, but because that’s the way things worked.

You simply didn’t profit from the office. Period.

Enter, Donald J. Trump, New York real estate finagler.

During Trump’s first term, foreign embassies booked hotel rooms at Trump properties at inflated room rates. State officials spent taxpayer money at his golf courses and ballrooms. The Trump Organization kept operating as normal while its owner sat in the Oval Office — and foreign governments, who understood exactly what they were doing, kept the money flowing.

Multiple lawsuits were filed. Courts spent years wrestling over who had the right to sue and what “emolument” actually meant.

None of it ultimately mattered. More……